Dr. Sandra Small

Finding better ways to help parents to talk to their kids about smoking

Previous research has shown that parents who talk to their children about smoking is a potentially protective factor against their children taking up smoking. But little was known about whether parents actually do this and to what extent they talk with their children about not smoking.

Armed with a grant from the Canadian Respiratory Health Professionals, a professional section of the Canadian Lung Association, Sandra Small started studying how parents in rural areas talk to their children about smoking. What she found was that although many parents did talk with their children about smoking, the way that they communicated didn’t always follow recommendations by authorities in the field. She also found that some parents had not talked with their children about smoking at all.

Her research findings will help health professionals working in the field of youth smoking prevention to improve interventions to guide and support parents in their anti-smoking approaches with their children and for policy makers in terms of provision of appropriate resources and services to facilitate parental efforts toward smoking prevention.